Arizona’s key to NFL success: Older coaches

By Matthew Heimer

Coaching a professional football team is mentally and physically grueling, as coaches toil through round-the-clock strategizing and Sisyphean sessions of watching and rewatching game film. It can wear a body down, and that’s one reason many teams prefer to hire men who are close to their physical prime to be their head coaches. (The median age among National Football League coaches is 51.5.)

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Coaching successfully across a wide age gap.

But one NFL team has seen some success this year by bucking that trend, as Kevin Clark reports this week in The Wall Street Journal. The Arizona Cardinals, a losing team in 2012, hired 61-year-old Bruce Arians as their head coach in the offseason (replacing a fired 50-year-old). Arians, who had almost 20 years of experience as an assistant under his belt, became one of the oldest first-time head coaches in NFL history—and he in turn has brought in three coaches ranging in age from 68 to 78 to serve as his assistants.

Along with this influx of maturity came a reversal of the team’s fortunes: Arizona, which last had a winning season in 2009, is in the playoff hunt this season, with a 7-5 record going into this weekend’s games.

As Clark describes them, the Cardinals’ “Over the Hill Gang” bring to mind the retired white-collar pros who pick up a little bit of consulting work in their old industries without shouldering a full-time load. Clark calls them “elite technical coaches who specialize in fixing glitches in players’ mechanics” — improving a defensive lineman’s footwork, for example. Each is paired with a younger coach who has related but broader responsibilities; the reader comes away with the impression that those youngsters shoulder most of the late-night grunt work. (NFL teams are limited to a fixed number of players, but they can have as many coaches as they want.)

League-wide, there doesn’t seem to be any close correlation between a head coach’s age and a team’s success. But it seems worth noting that the four current NFL coaches who are older than Arians include 62-year-old Pete Carroll, whose Seattle Seahawks have the league’s best record, and perennial playoff coach Bill Belichick, 61, of the New England Patriots. The oldest of all: Tom Coughlin, 67, whose New York Giants are somewhat stinker-pants this year but have won two of the last six Super Bowls.

About Encore

Encore looks at the changing nature of retirement, from new rules and guidelines for financial security to the shifting identities, needs and priorities of people saving for and living in retirement. Our lead blogger is editor Matthew Heimer, and frequent contributors include editor Amy Hoak, writer Catey Hill, and MarketWatch columnists Elizabeth O’Brien, Robert Powell and Andrea Coombes. Encore also features regular commentary from The Wall Street Journal retirement columnists Glenn Ruffenach and Anne Tergesen and the Director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, Alicia H. Munnell.